“He feels like a new signing” is one of football’s most overused phrases, but in the case of West Ham’s Luis Guilherme, I suspect we will be using it later rather than sooner.
Poor old Luis is in something of a no-man’s land at present. Towards the end of the transfer window, I wrote an article on these very pages explaining why I thought it might be prudent to loan out the 18-year-old. Nothing I have seen since has convinced me that I was wrong, as the Brazilian wonderkid continues to be completely anonymous at the club.
The much-heralded first signing of the transfer window finds himself in something of a West Ham limbo. It would probably have been too embarrassing for the club to loan out a player they had just paid 20 million pounds for; however, this is precisely what clubs like our next opponents, Chelsea, do.
It is common practice for big clubs in domestic and European football to purchase young overseas talent and then loan them out for a year. The list of players whom this has happened to reads like a who’s who of European football greats, so I’m unsure why the Hammers would leave Guilherme in a state of inactive perpetuity.
Guilherme is clearly deemed not good enough for Julen Lopetegui’s first team but possibly too good for the under-21s. As a result, the player seems to do nothing other than train, and it is notable that he his presence in pictures and footage provided by the club’s in-house media team has been much diminished.
Guilherme inactivity is helping nobody
It can’t be a particularly good situation for the player mentally. By all accounts, he was courted by several very big football clubs but chose to sign for West Ham after being persuaded by Tim Steidten. Guilherme is a young man in unfamiliar surroundings, and I’m quite sure the one thing that would be familiar to him is playing football, yet he appears to be denied that pleasure currently.
My solution would be to get him into the under-21 team alongside compatriot Luizão, then loan him out in January. While I would be excited to see him named in the starting line-up or even warming up on the bench before making his debut for the first team, it’s just not going to happen.
West Ham have a £20 million asset on their hands and are showing huge inexperience in handling this type of situation. A brief glance at tomorrow’s Premier League opponents should hopefully be enough to show us exactly how to do things.